Germinal - Émile Zola

Germinal is the story of a mining community in 19th century France. It's a story of the effects of poverty & degradation on generations of workers & their families. It's also the story of an idealistic young man who encourages the workers to go on strike & witnesses the battle played out between the workers & the bosses.

Étienne Lantier is an unemployed mechanic. He's tramping the countryside looking for work & is almost at his last gasp when he reaches Le Voreux, a coal mine near Montsou. He stops to warm his hands at a brazier & gets into conversation with Bonnemort, an old man who has worked as a miner & now a driver. There's no work for mechanics but Étienne is taken on as a miner. He becomes part of Maheu's crew. Maheu, his wife, La Maheude, & their children, Zacharie, Catherine, Jeanlin, Lenore, Henri, Alzire & the baby Estelle live in village Two Hundred and Forty. It's part of the dehumanizing of the miners that their villages have numbers instead of proper names. Maheu & his older children work in the mine, the children as soon as they're considered old enough at 12 or 13.

From our first glimpse of the family we can see how their poverty defines & constricts their lives. Although five of the family are working (Bonnemort is Maheu's father), they struggle to make ends meet. La Maheude has no money for food & it's six days before payday. The eldest son, Zacherie, & his girlfriend, Philoméne, already have two children but La Maheude doesn't want them to marry & set up house together because that would mean losing Zacharie's wages. Catherine, at nearly 15, still hasn't started puberty because of malnutrition & the hard physical work of being a tram girl in the mine. She is being pursued by the brutish Chaval, & although she resists him, she seems resigned to her future. Working in the mine until she gets pregnant, then relying on her man's wages to support her & the children that will inevitably follow. Alzire is crippled & makes herself useful in the house. Jeanlin is a criminal in the making as leader of his group of friends, stealing & vandalising. Maheu is a respected worker but the mine's managers continue to squeeze the workers to maximize profits for the shareholders.

Étienne's first day as a miner is described in claustrophobic detail. The journey down into the hot, airless mine, the two kilometre walk from the bottom of the shaft to the seam where the team is working. The backbreaking physical labour & all for starvation wages. Étienne boards at the Maheu's house & is attracted to Catherine although he's too diffident to act on his feelings, even when he realises that she returns them. He is disgusted by Chaval's relentless pursuit of Catherine & the two men become rivals in every sense. Étienne's friendship with Rasseneur & Souvarine introduces him to socialist ideas &, when the Company announce a new pay rate that will, in effect, be a pay cut, the workers, encouraged & led by Étienne, go on strike.

The strike is the central act that brings the workers together. Everyone works together to force the Company to agree to their terms at first but, as time drags on & the small relief fund they've saved is spent, divisions open up between families & friends as some of the workers go back to the pit. The Company brings in Belgian workers & soldiers to protect them & guard the mine & a confrontation is inevitable as the Company refuse to back down & the miners become desperate.

Germinal is an absorbing, compelling & shocking novel. The Maheus & the other families in the village are trapped in a cycle of poverty. Their children have no education, no prospects other than working in the mine. The girls are sexually exploited almost as soon as they start work &, when they fall pregnant, can only hope that their lover will marry them & bring home enough money to keep body & soul together. Bonnemort has worked all his life & now that he's old, barely able to stand & coughing up black phlegm, the Company are quibbling about his pension. La Maheude is forced to ask the local gentry for charity when she has no food in the house & they offer her clothes instead of bread or money. The women in the village, at home with young children, spend their days gossipping viciously about each other. The men struggle to provide for their families & turn to drink, gambling & crime.

There are no heroes in the book, only ordinary people struggling to make a living but defeated by their poverty. Étienne's journey from novice miner to fully committed activist to disillusionment & ostracism is the central journey of the book. The Maheus, especially La Maheude & Catherine, are deeply sympathetic characters. Their suffering is hard to witness & from the moment the troops are brought in, there can be no happy ending for the strikers.  

Germinal is a remarkable novel. Every time I read one of Zola's novels I'm struck again by the contrast between English & French fiction of the period. Zola's frankness about sex & violence can't be matched by any English author of the period. Germinal was published in 1885 & I can't think of an English novel that can compare with it. Hardy, Gissing & George Moore were struggling against the power of the circulating libraries at the same time & mostly being burned by them. The sensation novelists had pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in fiction but their stories don't have the shocking realism of Zola & Balzac. I have several more of Zola's novels on the tbr shelves & I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.

Black diamonds - Catherine Bailey

The black diamond of the title is coal. This is the story of the Fitzwilliam family of Wentworth House in Yorkshire, one of the wealthiest aristocratic families in England in the early 20th century. It’s the story of how the family’s lives were intimately connected with the coal mines they owned & the miners they employed. It’s also the story of the family’s spectacular fall from grace so that by the 1950s, the last two male heirs were in the courts disputing the legitimacy of one of them. The book opens with the funeral of the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam in 1902. He was one of the richest men in the country, but the pomp & ritual of his funeral was marred by the fact that virtually none of the family were speaking to his grandson, Billy, the new Earl, because they believed him to be an imposter. Billy’s father, Lord Milton, son of the 6th Earl was epileptic. This carried a terrible stigma of mental instability in the 19th century. Milton was sent out to the United States as he was seen as an embarrassment to the family. He took his young family with him & while they were in Canada, his son & heir, Billy, was born. Milton’s parents had done everything they could to prevent him marrying, even to the extent of telling potential brides of the “taint” of his epilepsy. When he did marry & have a family, his father was horrified &, after Milton’s early death, rumours spread that, in the wilds of North America, a boy had been substituted for the female child actually born. In 1902, the family decided not to go to court to settle the question. They were far more frightened of scandal than the thought of an illegitimate Earl. The story of the Fitzwilliams is full of stories like this. It’s also a story of contrasts. George V paid a visit to Wentworth House in 1912 when discontent in the North was worsening. He wanted to see the conditions of the mines for himself & even took a tour underground. At the time the royal party was at Wentworth, two explosions ripped through the Cadeby Main colliery, not far away. The first explosion killed dozens of men. The second explosion killed many of the rescuers who had volunteered to try to reach the trapped men. This is the most effective part of the book. The story alternates between the eyewitness accounts of the disaster & the reactions of the King & Queen, the local community & the whole country. The contrast between the party at Wentworth House, where there were eight sittings of dinner for the servants according to their rank in the household, & the poverty of the miners & their families is compelling. The Fitzwilliams were one of the more enlightened mine owners. They hadn’t employed a company to run their mines, they oversaw them closely & their employees were well looked after by the standards of the time. Safety was paramount, unlike most other mines which were run for profit & the miners were expendable. This is not just another story of aristocratic goings-on. The servants, miners & their families are just as much a part of the story as the aristocrats. Catherine Bailey has done a remarkable job of piecing together the story of the Fitzwilliams, especially as they destroyed practically all their personal papers. Often only one stray letter or piece of evidence remains for her to reveal the truth of the many scandals in the family’s past. It’s an impressive work of detection.